I just said this on twitter but I'm a bit awed at the number of industry people I'm seeing who admit to having no private backups of the shows they worked on, even lead showrunners. I genuinely thought it was just a given they would end up with digital copies of their own without really even having to try. I feel like the process of making a cartoon in the digital era must still look very very different than I thought it did.

So they send everything off to be animated and....what comes back? There's no further editing or screening or anything that involves the complete video file passing through crew hands and computers? Or are they deleting the files under an assumption that the episodes will be out there in the world forever?

Shit, I obsessively back up the raw master files of evert single thing I've ever made for even the most microscopic chance I'll ever want it again as long as I live. Sometimes I even save it at multiple points in its creation as different files in case I wanted to go back and overhaul something, or any reason to show it to anyone in that state, or if somehow any of my data was just fried or corrupted some day! Anything!

Some places where I've worked had computer with disabled ports. If you wanted to listen to music while you worked, you had to ask the boss and rip the CD on his computer and then send it to yourself through the network cause no internet either. And they had you sign NDAs anyway so you'd be fired if they thought you took anything, or mentioned anything to anyone. I do save several versions of everything when I work, but it’s all on work computers and then when the project is over it’s archived and you can’t access it anymore. If you wanted anything for your portfolio, you had to go through a long and grueling process where you filled out forms and basically begged so they’d give you, maybe, one scene. On top of that, I do VR video stitching, editing and effects and -if- they let you take a scene, they will only let you take either the footage before any of the work, or the final shot, but not both. So you can’t. Actually show your work in a portfolio. Because if you do your job right, it doesn’t look like you did anything because it blends in. And that’s if you’re even still at the company and they haven’t just called everyone to a meeting, fired everyone present at the meeting and then locked your computer, account, work email and everything while you were out of the room. And now you can’t even get to your desk to get your bag without someone to play security just in case you try to access it and take any of the work, specifically. (That’s literally how all of my jobs ended. They called half the floor to a surprise ‘meeting’ that was actually just firing us, making it super awkward for the fired people AND the remaining people) So on top of an industry that tries to squeeze overtime out of you wherever it can, you’re supposed to do more of the same work in the free time you get so you have something to show to future employers. Hell, I had to do some 3d animation for a different studio recently and asked to send myself some footage of it, or the model so i could animate on my own time, and got denied

So uh TLDR; yeah you SAVE a bunch of copies, on company computers, but they scrutinize everything you do and are prepared to rain legal repercussions on you if you try and take any copy of your own work home, even as a showcase of your own abilities (and i assume future employers would hold it against you if they saw identifiable work? if you did steal like some people are suggesting?) A guy at work only mentioned the title of some low budget movie we were working on on facebook once, and was immediately fired and idk if there were criminal charges but he was shut out of the entire industry for like at least 5 years